Stories

"In my grandparents’ attic there is a ghost named Levi. He is an old general from an old war, and built the house a long time ago. We know he is there because he once woke my Aunt Sarah with a hand on her throat. She screamed and screamed and woke everyone in the house. She wasn’t harmed, but no--no, I wouldn’t say he is harmless."

"They’d gotten a little silly, lounging around in the big armchairs and smoking cigarettes in a slow, languorous way that felt fancy and rich to them, and someone had started singing a ridiculous song in a low, jazzy voice, and for a bit Joan had wished that this was all there would be to the evening, this beginning."

"Good horsemanship shares its methods with the governance of totalitarian regimes. You must expect inquiries about your strength, your ability to lead and to punish. There are other parts too—partnership and affection—but sometimes, when faced with another that could crush you, you have to posture up a bit. Bluff and bluster. You have to act tougher than you’d like, sometimes. Tougher than you are."

"In the news today was an article about a dog in Yuba City who dug up human bones in the backyard. There was a jaw bone and a skull. The police suspected religious rituals. My dog too has been digging."

"Nothing is lost, but it is only fair to admit that, every now and again, something may become lost to you. Short-sighted concealment of difficult facts and objects is obtainable, within certain bounds—go to a place you do not know well, cover the thing with sticks and leaves or nudge it into a particularly dark afternoon shadow, walk away and never come to that spot again, even in dreams. It isn’t lost, but you’ve left it for someone else to find. In most cases, that will be me. I am a prodigious finder of the things you’ve left behind."

"In the attic there was a ghost. We named him Levi. Aunt Sarah named him Levi on the night when she was a teenager and she awoke screaming, feeling that a hand had been touching her, a man's hand on her hair and her face and her throat."

"As they passed under the water the eyes closed, and this sent a reverberation through Craig that was not relief. He waited, watched as the lips parted and the mouth filled with brack. He resisted the limp-flailing arms that slapped at his chest, his shoulders, never reaching his face. He wondered how long it would take such a man to drown. He did not think it would be long."

"It barked once before it turned and ran—barked, because she had no other word for it, and not really once, but in a strange, reverberating chorus, a chaotic rumble like a hundred dogs barking, like a pack falling upon the fox: and there was that squealing in it too."

"She wasn't sure exactly how it had started; nothing particular was said, no agreements made, but as they had walked side by side around the city—the Met, Battery Park, St. John's, everything you're supposed to see—she had known that they were suddenly, intensely together, and each word had become a stitch, a little stab followed by a pulling closer."

"As Miriam came to stand beside him, he turned to show her what he was holding, though he did not look at her: it was the body of a bird, its feathers standing out perfectly white against its tiny pink beak and orange feet. It was small and deflated looking, with its neck extended and laid against He's palm in a soft curve, an oddly inviting angle, like a beautiful virgin in an old movie."

"Along a dried riverbed she found a place where a cow had died. All around the scrubby grass was flattened, the stalks bent or torn, and she wondered if the animal had been thrashing. Her husband had told her how they starve, the old ones who can't eat, or the weak ones when the summer is so hot that the ground cracks and plants shrivel. He'd told her how they lie on the ground and paddle their legs, scoring dark marks into the earth, as if they could swim to the end of the world and pull themselves out of it. He'd told her this to frighten her, and had succeeded."

"Lucille Fitch, despite a slim frame and a well-bred delicacy, gave birth to five children in her relatively short life. Her first, Peter, died at only a few weeks old of SIDs—or crib-death as it was called at the time—an event which shook her confidence badly, but which the doctors assured her was an unexplainable and unrepeatable as the history of the world itself. Her last child, Michael, was a mongoloid. The middle three were normal, or at least healthy: Sarah first, then Charles, and then, to Lucy's complete surprise, an atomic bomb."

"One day my grandfather was out driving. This was after the war, after my grandparents were married and living in Pennsylvania with my aunt Sarah, before my father was born. As he was driving, he became sure that he had hit something back along the road behind him, so he turned around to check."

"I was born at the age of thirty-two with a Ph.D. in comparative religion. It happened in May, almost five years ago now, when a small blood clot that had been forming in the muscle of my calf unhooked itself from the wall of its blood vessel and went traveling."

"But he knows that if he touches her now he will later remember the path his hands took, and he will think of it every time he looks at her body—the invisible, ineradicable snail-trails he's drawn onto her cleanliness."

"For my own part, I just worried that they'd be lonely—heaven is full of old people and babies and doesn't offer much for teenage girls. I imagine them, listless and awkward in their wrinkling gowns, stuck with each other, and no one else dressed up."

Monsterpublished in Dark Sky

"I do not know what would have happened if Mike had ever been fast enough to tag us (if it could, after so long, have been as gentle as that). Perhaps we would have become the monsters and he would have become one of us and the sweethearts would have poured out of him onto the grass or leapt up from the ground to swarm us. Or perhaps the game would have ended."

The Inland Seaspublished in issue 2 of Amor Fati

"The facts are widely known: On September 25th, 1998, a rain storm started in Western Massachusetts. The rain, while heavy at times, was not unseasonable, and outside of a higher than average number of traffic accidents, local news stations reported nothing out of the ordinary that evening."

About the Author

Emily Kiernan is the author of a novel, Great Divide(Unsolicited Press, 2014), and many short fictions. She is the prose editor at Noemi Press, a fiction editor at Rivet Journal, and the curator of the Backyard Reading Series. She resides in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with her man and her dog.